Helidon Xhixha In Random Order

Giardino di Boboli, Palazzo Pitti, Gallerie degli Uffizi

27.06.2017-29.10.2017 - Events

A new exhibition of monumental sculptures by the celebrated sculptor Helidon Xhixha is on view at the Boboli Garden. Curated by Eike Schmidt, Director of the Gallerie degli Uffizi, with the art critic Diego Giolitti, the exhibition is entitled Helidon Xhixha In Random Order.

In a spectacular layout involving fifteen monumental installations and sculptures spread out over the Boboli Garden and the city of Florence, Xhixha explores the concept of chaos and order, his work a tribute to the way in which these concepts have been addressed down the ages not only in philosophy and in the arts but also in the natural world.

Their surfaces glistening like mirrors, the works merge into their surroundings environment, pursuing a sophisticated intellectual and aesthetic investigation and offering a new take on the theme of the interactions between art and nature that was so close to the Medici family's artists, who interpreted it with spectacular fountains and mesmerising grottoes in those centuries.

Eight of the fifteen sculptures on display have been created expressly for this exhibition, including Order and Chaos, Helium and Neon, on display in the Ampitheatre in Boboli. Knowledge and Infinite, set up in the area in front of the Pitti Palace, play a go-between role with Florence and with the austere and mathematical charactere of its urban aesthetic. With Chaos, a monumental installation expressly created for the Limoniaia conservatory, Xhixha explores nature in an effort to penetrate the meaning of caos.

In most of his works, Helidon Xhixha transforms stainless steel, polished until it gleams like a mirror, into incredible abstract forms at once massive and delicate, a visual comment on the interaction between metal and light, between the object and its surrounding environment, between the tangible and the intangible. His recent success at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and at the 2016 London Design Biennale, together with the prestigious awards he has received, have given Xhixha a position of prestige in the panorama of international art and his works are currently among the most recognisable and sought-after in the context of contemporary sculpture.

Xhixha's art has a natural depth and breadth, speaking to everyone at different cultural and intellectual levels. As Eike Schmidt, the Director of the Gallerie degli Uffizi put it, these works are imbued with a special communicative tension and forge a unique and different relationship with each individual observer. "Like an enlargement of the dual nature of light, both wave and particle, from the quantic dimension to the monumental dimension, Helidon Xhixha's sculptures are at once solid object and ephemeral mirror: solids which yet seem to exist only in relation to that which surrounds them and to those who observe them. At the same time, however, they are not the product of complex theoretical reasoning; rather, they offer an immediate, gut-level experience to the observer regardless of his or her age or intellectual formation. It is indeed rare for sculpture to succeed in drawing the attention of children and adults alike, yet both tend to engage in a lengthy exploration of Xhixha's work and generally take out their smartphones to capture their own image together with the images being reflected by the steel. The sculptures also act as magnets for the very young, who often touch their bizarre surfaces and move around them, observing the changes in their reflected image, pulling faces or leaping about in front of them. These highly interactive and communicative objects multiply, separate and distort the observer's image, in many cases even turning it completely upside down."